While on vacation in Ireland last week I became quite obsessed. I had already sunk a solid fifteen hours into Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin prior to my journey across the pond, but I found myself sinking to a new obsessive gaming low. I was consumed. My compulsion would not be satisfied until I'd completed every quest, killed every monster, acquired every item and beat the game three times over with each character. Chalk up another 20 hours of my life. And I wasn't really even having much fun.

It was... weird. It's been quite some time since I've been singularly so focused on one game, not really giving it much thought until I dreamt about slaying Castlevania monsters last night. It's rare that I'll even finish a game (and not that uncommon to leave games unopened for months) so to focus my attention on one title, accomplishing (almost) everything is rare. The only other videogame to so completely suck my time was Advance Wars Dual Strike. My game clock sits at about 150 hours, not including aborted missions.

I'm not sure what does it. Why some games click and some don't. Anyone out there go throught this? What games have you been unhealthily obsessed with? Michael McWhertor